Uncategorized

Last month, I gave the talk first referenced in last month’s Tuesday blog festival, concerning conversion functions with TRY. I can’t say I wasn’t nervous about giving my first presentation to a professional organization, even as a 101-level lightning talk. I was concerned about my own abilities on that stage, being around a mix of developers who may not have been privy to TRY_CAST, TRY_CONVERT, or TRY_PARSE (oof), and people who know this already and were curious as to how I would fare on stage. For the latter group, it was like presenting a class project to the professors in my department. So how do I think it turned out?

It was a success, and not only based on feedback from others. It was a good chance to understand what is required of speaking and how I could break the ice with others who knew generally what I did, but wasn’t sure what I knew about.

Always bring cables, and backup cables. I did bring my work laptop as a backup computer when I had update issues with my affectionately-nicknamed “Shitty Toshiba”, but the HDMI connection is not the most modern…and I never thought to bring the cables for it. So we had a misadventure where I had to open my script on another computer. Originally, I had UPDATE and INSERT statements included, but I couldn’t risk that WideWorldImporters was in its original condition. Maybe the cables would have allowed me to continue with more than SELECT.

Even when carrying a note card, don’t go too off topic just to show you aren’t reading from the card. I’m not the most concise person, so it was easy for me to elaborate more than needed.

Know your room setup. This was my first chapter meeting since summer, and the meetings moved to a new office building of which I was unfamiliar.

There were also a few positives to take away.

Since I had to use a backup computer, one which I did not have WideWorldImporters as it was my work databases only, I was able to rely on agnostic SELECT statements to show the functions in action. It was the biggest key to recovery.

I kept a sense of calm despite the cable issue, and despite deep down thinking “they don’t think I’m prepared…fuck” while taking longer than necessary to set up. To take something in stride would not rattle my audience or allow me to come off nervous; I can be very expressive, so it did take some work to remain confident that a backup solution was in the works.

I was confident that I knew the basics of the subject, while not trying to act like I knew everything on the subject. There was a moment early on where I said I was a developer and immediately ducked, explaining next that I “didn’t want the DBAs to throw things at me. Wait until after.” Got a good laugh.

You know how I said I elaborated more than needed? I didn’t elaborate too much, as the two rehearsals of my talk seemed to keep me relatively constrained, even with my audibles.

The next phase? The submission for a Saturday event…a full-length presentation. Now here’s my chance to take advantage of the help that came from this forum! Thanks to everyone, especially Andy, for giving a platform for us noobs to join the speaker chapter.

So I’ve been on a hiatus for over a month, because life got in my way…more so I got in my own way. Adjustments to a new job, a lot of travel, and some other house matters. Plus, I’m realizing that there are a lot of steps that go into putting coherent thoughts into a technical blog. I’m asking some questions now about code formats, and what are the best tags…and I also have someone to proofread.

So I’m hoping to get a fresher post this week, but I can’t be sure if I’ll have long breaks like many of us on the interwebs. Time will tell, as I hope to keep this site interesting.

Everyone needs their introductory (or re-introductory) blog post when entering the sphere. So this one is no different. I see many great professionals and advocates on here with some well-developed websites, with some great advice and random musings for others to check out. I have asked myself many times, “what can I share with the world, and maybe use a blog to ask others their thoughts?” Plus, how do I brand myself?

Well, it was time to do something about it. I decided to start a full-blown website. I could discuss life on the autism spectrum and share my observations dealing with all things structured query language, and how I solved some problems in my professional dealings (along with hearing about even better solutions in the comments). So I hope to post regularly with some topics that will interest both of my key audiences and their subsets.

I’m still figuring out exactly how to combine a standard blog with a professional repository, and how to actually do a good website. So this will probably change over time, but I still hope that those of you database professionals (there is a natural SQL Server bias) or autism spectrum parents and self-advocates will get something from here.